Scorpion Strike

by John Gilstrap

  Ten minutes into the herding process, everyone had food, and now it was Erin’s turn. The only sandwiches left were tuna fish on rye bread. She didn’t hate it, but it would not have been her first choice. Now she just hoped that the mayonnaise hadn’t been left in the sun all day.

  She remained standing while she ate, resting her ginger ale on the TV stand in the living room. Her grandfather always joked at Thanksgiving that you could tell how hungry the crowd was by how much conversation there was at the table. By that standard, this crowd was starving.

  “You’re very good with the children,” a voice said from behind her.

  Erin turned to see the man she didn’t recognize.

  “I told your man that they were hungry,” she said.

  “I know,” the man said. “And he told me.” He extended his hand. “I’m the man they call Alpha,” he said. “I’m in charge here.”

  She looked at his hand and then took a two-handed bite out of her sandwich. “I’ll shake your hand when I see my parents again.”

  Alpha smiled. His eyes looked kinder than she expected. “You’re a feisty one,” he said.

  “I’m tired and I’m scared,” she said. “We all are. I don’t know why you’re here, but you’re being cruel to the children. I can only imagine what you’re doing with the adults.”

  Alpha didn’t reply at first. “We all have jobs to do,” he said at length. “Some are uglier than others. As long as everyone behaves, then there should be no more violence.”

  Erin opened her mouth to say something, but then took another bite of sandwich, instead.

  “You may speak freely to me,” Alpha said.

  “You don’t want to hear what I have to say.”

  “Listen to my words . . . Erin, is it? Erin Talley?”

  Something icy shot through her belly at the mention of her name.

  Alpha continued, “I am a man of my word. If I tell you that you are free to speak, then that is exactly what you are.”

  Erin put the remains of her sandwich back on her plate and faced Alpha full-on. “You say you want everyone to behave. If we behave, then you’ll stop shooting people. Well, if that’s the case, then your soldiers can’t wait for the opportunity to shoot everyone in this room.”

  She scanned Alpha’s face for a reaction, and found that he looked interested, fully engaged in what she was saying. A gentle nod urged her to continue.

  “I don’t know how you’re dealing with the grown-ups,” she said. “Grown-ups confuse the hell out of me. But I’m telling you that by keeping all these kids locked up like this, you’re begging for a junior riot.”

  “We brought books and games and movies,” Alpha said.

  “And that’s fine,” Erin agreed, “but only for a little while. They’re kids. They need to stay occupied. It’s beyond cruel that you and your soldiers won’t let them outside to play.”

  “I thought that children didn’t play outside anymore,” Alpha said. It appeared to be a serious observation.

  “Do you have any children?” she asked.

  “That’s none—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. Do you know anyone who has children?”

  Alpha recoiled and laughed. “My goodness, I bet your father has his hands filled with you. Yes, I know people who have children.”

  Erin was vaguely aware that she was using much of the same attitude and body language that could launch her father into orbit. He called it being sassy, while her mom called it being bitchy. “Then you know,” she said, “that children need options. If you want the little ones to stay inside, you tell them they have to go outside. Right now, this place smells like a dirty toilet. It’s too hot and there’s no breeze. Half of them will probably want to stick around inside and watch movies, but a chunk of the others will want to go outside and do something. Even if it’s only a change of place where they can sit and talk.”

  “You seem to be an expert in these things,” Alpha said.

  “Duh, I’m a kid.”

  Alpha launched a big laugh. “All right,” he said. “You win. I will tell my men that your children will be allowed to go outside, and I will tell them that you are responsible for all of them.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Alpha held up his hands. “Hey, you want the role of mother, and you’ve got it. Roll will be taken every hour, and also on a random basis. There are thirty-five children here and—”

  “Thirty-four,” Erin corrected. “I’ve counted many times.”

  “Did you count yourself?”

  She blushed.

  He winked. “I count on you to make sure that the count remains the same. If anyone goes missing, I will hold you personally responsible.”

  She gaped. This wasn’t a responsibility she’d signed on for.

  Alpha continued to smile as he leaned in close and said, “You do not want to disappoint me. I would hate to have to deliver a daughter’s corpse to her parents.”

  * * *

  Venice decided that the office could wait. When they got to the bottom of Church Street, where the firehouse was on the left, she swung a turn to the right, down Water Street toward the fishing piers. “This nerve agent thing,” she said. “Is it a strategy from the top, or some rogue action within the CIA?”

  Derek made a waving motion with both hands. “Not my pay grade,” he said. “I am strictly an implementer of plans. They don’t let me within a hundred yards of policy, and the politics bore me.”

  Normally, Venice’s warning bells would be clanging like a carillon, but the more time she spent with Derek, the more she liked him. The more she trusted him. Yes, she understood that was a dangerous place to be, but sometimes chances had to be taken.

  “Why are you doing this?” she asked.

  “I already told you.”

  “You told me you were a fanboy for FreakFace666,” Venice said. “That doesn’t explain your willingness to share what is probably highly classified information.”

  “Oh, there’s no probably about it,” Derek said with a wry chuckle. “Off-the-charts classified. Go-to-jail classified.”

  He seemed to want additional prodding, but Venice waited for the rest.

  “You said you’d read my personnel file,” he said. “I’m not cut out for the NSA. I know too much shit that I wish I didn’t know. I’ve seen too many decisions made that hurt people for the sole purpose of advancing some bureaucratic asshat’s career. Everything’s so goddamned secret that the assholes who run the place know that they can do whatever they want, essentially without consequence, because nobody can talk about the shit they’re doing without committing a felony.”

  “Are you talking about the political appointees?”

  Derek puffed a laugh for dramatic effect. “Oh, God no. Those guys are lost. It’s the career guys that run the place. The politicos are scared shitless of being exposed as the ignoramuses they are. They posture and make noises at press conferences, spouting carefully-crafted bullshit that’s been fed to them by the SES pukes who essentially run their own government.” Senior Executive Service.

  “That’s pretty harsh,” Venice said. “They can’t all be like that.”

  “No, of course they’re not all like that. In fact, in my experience, the vast majority of them are exactly the good soldiers and patriots that you’d hope they would be. The problem there is that good soldiers follow orders and do what they’re told. And, if I might throw in a little cynicism, they know that Fort Meade is a good gig, and they don’t want to screw that up for themselves.”

  “So, you’re a modern-day Don Quixote,” Venice said.

  “Fine, make fun if you want.”

  “I’m not making fun,” Venice said. “I’ve always admired Don Quixote.” She didn’t bother to add that the true modern-day Señor Quixote was her boss.

  “Then yes,” Derek said. “I’m that naïve guy who believes in doing the right thing because it is the right thing to do.”

  Venice smirked. “Like sharing top secrets wi
th relative strangers?”

  Derek didn’t drop a beat. “Yeah, exactly like that. It’s all in the timing. I knew that your friends were somehow in trouble, and then I found out about the VX. At least I’m not turning it over to the press. I know you have no tangible reason to believe this, but you really can trust me. I really am not trying to screw you.”

  The phrase hung in the air. Then they both laughed.

  “Okay, maybe later, but not that way,” Derek said.

  Venice had not blushed in a very long time. In any of a thousand different circumstances, she would have struck a posture of righteous indignation, but not today. Not with Derek.

  Over to the left, the docks of the fishing pier were fairly quiet. The morning boats had all gone out, and only a few had returned. There was an aroma to this part of town that Venice had come to realize that people either loved or hated, with no room for a middle ground. To her, the smell of fish and the river was the perfume of home. She loved it.

  “How much do you know about Security Solutions?” she asked.

  Derek gave her a sideward glance. “Have we crossed into the truth-telling phase of our relationship?”

  Relationship? “Um . . . sure.”

  “Remember,” Derek hedged, “I knew where to dig, and you left me some bread crumbs that others wouldn’t have.”

  This sounds like it’s going to be bad, Venice thought.

  “You look like I’m going to hit you,” Derek said.

  “I feel a little that way, too,” Venice said.

  He sighed deeply. “Look, I don’t want to freak you out. Let’s just say that I know that there’s a secret side to Security Solutions that creates a pretty wide swath of violence. I know there are a few unsolved murders in this country and others that more than likely have your team’s fingerprints on them. Please don’t confirm or deny.”

  Venice felt a little ill. Everything they did depended on absolute secrecy.

  “Don’t look like that,” Derek said. “You didn’t screw anything up. Really. Nobody else is going to be able to find the trail, I promise you.”

  “You can’t know that,” Venice said. The words were already out before she realized that she’d just confirmed his suspicions.

  “Yes, I can,” Derek said. “What little trail used to be there is all gone now.” He beamed.

  Venice truly didn’t know what to make of this. “This is what you do to people who piss you off? You cover their tracks for them?”

  “Only for FreakFace666,” he said. He pointed at his face with both forefingers. “Fanboy.”

  They walked in silence for twenty yards.

  “You guys do what I want to do,” Derek said.

  That earned him a look. “What is that?”

  “You create mayhem for all the right reasons. Hostage rescue, right?”

  “Holy crap.”

  “That’s okay,” Derek said. “I told you, you can trust me.”

  “You know that none of this is my decision, right?”

  “No, that would be up to retired First Sergeant Jonathan Grave, formerly Gravenow.”

  Venice’s sense of dread deepened.

  “Oh, come on,” Derek teased. “That’s public record. He owns the friggin’ company.”

  Venice’s pulse raced and she felt light-headed. This was all too much. This was the nightmare. The nightmare.

  “Audition me,” Derek said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Audition me. There’s bad shit going down in the Pacific, off the coast of Mexico, right? You’ve got a lot to do, right? Palm some of it off on me.”

  “I can’t let you in the office,” she said. “I’ve already told you that.”

  “I don’t need to go into your office,” Derek shot back. “You know what I do. You know my skills. Give me a decent Internet connection and I can do pretty much anything.”

  Venice’s mind raced as fast as her heart now. Digger was going to be furious when he got wind of this. Boxers was likely to kill Derek and Venice both.

  Jonathan’s voice materialized in her head. What’s done is done. Irrelevant. Correct the course and solve the problem. She’d heard him say it a thousand times. It was the verbose corollary to, Shit happens. Derek knew what he knew about their operations. That couldn’t be undone. Jonathan had trusted people before, and they’d never turned on him. Probably because of the overt threat of shattering retribution if they ever tried. No one pulled off intimidation better than Big Guy.

  Venice ran through her options. If Derek was as reliable as she thought (hoped?), then she could use his help. But if this was a Machiavellian power play—playing the long game—then his effort to help could screw everything up.

  Which he could easily do without any permission from her. She reminded herself that Derek was TickTock2, for crying out loud. The guy had mad skills. With what he already knew, he could wreak havoc on everything if he was of a mind to. In the end, the decision was obvious. It was even easy.

  “Remember the electrical-grid play Gloomity did a few months ago?”

  “When we blacked out the rich guy’s private island?”

  Venice grinned and made her eyebrows dance.

  Derek grinned, too. “Ah,” he said. “You want me to black out a rich guy’s private island.”

  “Exactly. Can you do it?”

  “Oh, please. Do Leprechauns poop green? Of course I can. I can have them blacked out in a couple of hours, max.”

  “Just put the pieces in place,” Venice said. “We’ll need to wait for an order to actually make anything happen.”

  Derek giggled, kicked the ground, and clapped his hands. “This is going to be fun. What a great day!”

  CHAPTER 22

  HENRY WEST WATCHED OUT THE GULFSTREAM’S TINY WINDOW AS the Pacific Ocean grew closer and closer. These were the trying moments when you simply had to trust that the pilot was competent, and that his view included the image of a runway. A quick glance across the aisle showed an equally tense Boxers, who, as Henry understood things, would normally be flying the plane instead of sitting in the back. As it was, he’d enlisted a couple of recent retirees from the 160th SOAR—Special Operations Air Regiment—to sit in the drivers’ seats so he could participate in the mission planning.

  The satellite imagery that Mother Hen had scared up was helpful, but only to a point. It was always nice to know the terrain and the possibilities for infiltration and exfiltration, but without current data on where the hostages were being held, it was all an academic exercise. They knew that they needed to get to the island via a point on the eastern edge, and then they had to rescue people and kill bad guys. Those were the details that remained murky.

  If the bad guys could be eliminated, there’d be no need to evacuate any of the hostages. That was the preferred outcome. Henry and the rest of his team—they’d adopted the moniker Team Yankee—could leave as quickly as they’d arrived, presumably with Digger and Gunslinger in tow, and the rest of the vacationers would be left wondering who those masked men were.

  It all got stickier if good guys were wounded in the inevitable gunfight. They’d arranged to have another off-duty SOAR crew in the air with a rented medevac chopper orbiting off the area of operation. Was there anything in Mexico that could not be rented? Those medics could fly in anywhere to scoop and swoop a wounded operator, and they were capable of some pretty advanced medical care. For more advanced needs, there were some covert medical connections left over from the days of the Drug War, where a patient could be stabilized before being flown back to a real hospital in the States. All of that would be handled off the books, without official records.

  Dead civilians would be left behind to be dealt with by whatever poor suckers were going to be tasked with cleaning up this mess. That was a no-brainer. The real head-scratcher of a problem was what to do with wounded civilians, particularly those with severe wounds. As a practical matter, they were no more difficult to medevac than a wounded operator, but then what? Covert worlds we
re covert for a reason, and those covert medical facilities were not accessible to people outside of the Community. Hard stop. So, how do you drop off somebody with a bullet wound or shrapnel injury at a local hospital and disappear? A lot of questions would be asked for a lot of very good reasons.

  At the moment, they didn’t have an answer for that one. Boxers was rolling the dice that the fact of an infirmary on the island meant that there was a medical staff. Even if that were true, Henry questioned the ability of the resident medical team to handle major trauma, but that was not his call.

  The Gulfstream touched down without so much as a bump, and as they decelerated, Henry caught sight of a line of vehicles racing down the tarmac. It wasn’t clear that they were there for Team Yankee, but Henry thought that’s where the smart money would take him.

  “Hey, Big Guy,” he said. “I think we have company on the right.”

  “On the left, too,” She Devil said.

  Madman muttered, “This can’t be good.”

  Over the intercom, the pilot announced, “Hey, team. I’m getting word from the tower that we need to stop on the tarmac and be boarded.”

  Henry craned his neck to look at the cache of weapons stacked up in the rear of the aircraft.

  “This should be interesting,” Boxers grumbled. He unclipped his seat belt and unfolded himself from his white leather seat. He walked at a steep bow as he made his way up to the cockpit door and knocked. They opened it and Boxers went into the flight deck and chatted up the pilots.

  As they rolled to a stop, the vehicles stopped with them. Henry saw black SUVs and gray SUVs. None of them displayed any flashing lights, and they bore no markings that labeled them as government officials.

  “Any thoughts?” Henry asked to the others.

  “I am not going to jail,” Madman said.

  “That’s not an option in the first place,” She Devil said. “Big Guy would burn the whole country to the ground before he let himself be taken into custody.”

  “I’m not sure that’s entirely reassuring,” Henry quipped. He rose from his seat and wandered to the cockpit. “What’s going on?”